Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

harm humans, they must obey humans, and they must protect themselves, in that order.)
    (Even with Asimov’s three laws, there are also problems when there are contradictions among the three laws. For example, if one creates a benevolent robot, what happens if humanity makes self-destructive choices that can endanger the human race? Then a friendly robot may feel that it has to seize control of the government to prevent humanity from harming itself. This was the problem faced by Will Smith in the movie version of
I, Robot,
when the central computer decides that “some humans must be sacrificed and some freedoms must be surrendered” in order to save humanity. To prevent a robot from enslaving us in order to save us, some have advocated that we must add the zeroth law of robotics: Robots cannot harm or enslave the human race.)
    But many scientists are leaning toward something called “friendly AI,” where we design our robots to be benign from the very beginning. Since we are the creators of these robots, we will design them, from the very start, to perform only useful and benevolent tasks.
    The term “friendly AI” was coined by Eliezer Yudkowsky, a founder of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Friendly AI is a bit different from Asimov’s laws, which are forced upon robots, perhaps against their will. (Asimov’s laws, imposed from the outside, could actually invite the robots to devise clever ways to circumvent them.) In friendly AI, by contrast, robots are free to murder and commit mayhem. There are no rules that enforce an artificial morality. Rather, these robots are designed from the very beginning to desire to help humans rather than destroy them. They choose to be benevolent.
    This has given rise to a new field called “social robotics,” which is designed to give robots the qualities that will help them integrate into human society. Scientists at Hanson Robotics, for example, have stated that one mission for their research is to design robots that “ will evolve into socially intelligent beings, capable of love and earning a place in the extended human family.”
    But one problem with all these approaches is that the military is by far the largest funder of AI systems, and these military robots are specifically designed to hunt, track, and kill humans. One can easily imagine future robotic soldiers whose missions are to identify enemy humans and eliminate them with unerring efficiency. One would then have to take extraordinary precautions to guarantee that the robots don’t turn against their masters as well. Predator drone aircraft, for example, are run by remotecontrol, so there are humans constantly directing their movements, but one day these drones may be autonomous, able to select and take out their own targets at will. A malfunction in such an autonomous plane could lead to disastrous consequences.
    In the future, however, more and more funding for robots will come from the civilian commercial sector, especially from Japan, where robots are designed to help rather than destroy. If this trend continues, then perhaps friendly AI could become a reality. In this scenario, it is the consumer sector and market forces that will eventually dominate robotics, so that there will be a vast commercial interest in investing in friendly AI.
    MERGING WITH ROBOTS
    In addition to friendly AI, there is also another option: merging with our creations. Instead of simply waiting for robots to surpass us in intelligence and power, we should try to enhance ourselves, becoming superhuman in the process. Most likely, I believe, the future will proceed with a combination of these two goals, i.e., building friendly AI and also enhancing ourselves.
    This is an option being explored by Rodney Brooks, former director of the famed MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He has been a maverick, overturning cherished but ossified ideas and injecting innovation into the field. When he entered the field, the top-down approach was dominant in most universities. But the field was stagnating. Brooks raised a few eyebrows when he called for creating an army of insectlike robots that learned via the bottom-up approach by bumping into obstacles. He did not want to create another dumb, lumbering robot that took hours to walk across the room. Instead, he built nimble “insectoids” or “bugbots” that had almost no programming at all but would quickly learn to walk and navigate around obstacles by trial and